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L’Apothéose de Lully was Couperin’s hommage to his great musical predecessor and depicts the elder composer’s elevation to Mount Parnassus (where he plays duets with the shade of Corelli and, with Apollo’s blessing, effects a reconciliation between the contrasting French and Italian styles of the day). The Leçons de ténèbres were written for performance in Holy Week and demand—and here receive from Katherine Watson and Anna Dennis—vocal artistry of the highest order.

Awards

DISC OF THE WEEK (BBC RADIO 3 RECORD REVIEW)

Reviews

‘One of the particular delights of Cohen’s Arcangelo is the idiomatic continuo-playing of the lutenist Thomas Dunford … the soprano Katherine Watson gives a stylish, sensitive performance’ (Gramophone)

‘Excellently recorded, these performances of the Leçons approach perfection’ (BBC Music Magazine)» More

PERFORMANCE RECORDING

‘The concert instrumental is most beautifully played by the strings, with loving attention given to every detail but with no sense of tip-toeing from note to note’ (Early Music Review)

‘L’Apothéose de Lully [is] captured with grace in Arcangelo’s playing … the sacred Leçons de ténèbres, sung with purity by sopranos Katherine Watson and Anna Dennis [reveal] another side to Couperin’s art’ (Financial Times)» More

‘The coupling is Couperin’s wonderful tribute to his predecessor Lully. All three works receive very fine performances’ (MusicWeb International)

‘This recording … offers an elegant and well performed chamber version of L'Apothéose de Lully’ (MusicWeb International)

Other recommended albums

Introduction

François Couperin’s artistic philosophy is encapsulated in one telling phrase in the programme of his Apothéose de Lully, where Apollo declares that ‘the uniting of the French and Italian styles must create the perfection of music’. Couperin himself had been born into an organists’ milieu, with its uniquely French sound world. He nevertheless encountered the music of Italy in his twenties, perhaps through the intermediary of his cousin Marc-Roger Normand (the so-called ‘Couperin de Turin’) or at the Italophile court of the exiled James II of England at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. This music was to make such a profound impression on the young composer that, without forsaking his native idiom, he formed a lifelong ambition to exploit the best elements of both national traditions.

The Apothéose de Lully—or, to give it its full title, Concert instrumental sous le titre d’Apothéose composé à la mémoire immortelle de l’incomparable Monsieur de Lully—represents one of the final flowerings of that ambition. Published in 1725, it forms a pair with his Apothéose de Corelli, which had appeared a year earlier. The choice of composers venerated in these works reflects the fact that, for Couperin and many of his compatriots, Jean-Baptiste Lully was the epitome of the French style, just as Arcangelo Corelli was the embodiment of the Italian style.

As it happens, both composers feature in the narrative related in the movement titles of the Apothéose de Lully. For much of the work, Couperin’s famed réunion des goûts manifests itself less as a blending of national styles than as a juxtaposition of them. After all, the central figure here is Lully. Hence the opening movements are almost entirely in the French style, its languorous sweetness and simplicity emphasized not only by parallel motion in thirds and sixths but also by the profusion of delicate ornaments (agréments) and avoidance of strong dissonance. In the elegiac first movement, marked ‘gravement’ (track 1), Lully is represented in the blissful Elysian Fields, performing with the ‘musicianly Shades’ (‘Ombres liriques’). There follows a graceful, dance-like air portraying the same scene (track 2). Mercury arrives, his winged flight depicted by undulating semiquavers, and warns Lully that Apollo is about to appear (track 3). Apollo’s descent is rather more stately; as god of music, he gives Lully his violin and offers the composer a place on Mount Parnassus (track 4). Subterranean rumblings are then heard representing Lully’s contemporaries, envious of his success (track 5). Their subsequent ‘Plaintes’ are expressed in sighing melodies for ‘flutes or violins, very softly’ (track 6).

All these opening movements evoke the character of instrumental symphonies of the kind that still featured in the French operatic idiom established by Lully some fifty years earlier. This is particularly so of the two that represent his resentful contemporaries: the subterranean rumblings in the first are modelled on the pulsating quavers that characterize the shivering of the ‘cold people’ in Lully’s Isis (1677), while the ‘Plaintes’ in the second bear a striking resemblance, even in the choice of key, to the ‘Plainte de Pan’ from the same opera.

Once Lully has been wafted to Mount Parnassus (track 7), the character of the music changes markedly. The next movement, headed ‘Bitter-sweet welcome given to Lulli by Corelli and the Italian Muses’ (track 8), includes several typically Corellian features—a walking bass in solemn quavers, and pungent interlocking suspensions for the upper instruments. The Italians’ arrival is reflected in the notation itself: this movement is headed ‘largo’ rather than ‘lentement’; the quavers are marked to be played equally, in the Italian manner, rather than as notes inégales; and even the clefs are changed from the so-called French violin clef (G on the bottom line) to the standard treble clef favoured in Italy (G on the second line up). Yet Couperin cannot resist enlivening the melodic lines with French-style dotted rhythms, rapid tirades and abundant ornaments. The elegant simplicity of the native style returns, as do the clefs (marked ‘clés françoises’), when Lully gives thanks to Apollo in a graceful movement dominated by parallel thirds (track 9).

It is at this point that Apollo persuades Lully and Corelli that the ‘perfection of music’ can be achieved by a union of French and Italian styles—the famous réunion des goûts with which Couperin’s name is nowadays indelibly associated. The combination of styles is illustrated literally in the remaining seven movements: in each of these, the highest of the three lines is notated in the French violin clef and allotted to ‘Lulli’, while ‘Corelli’ plays the middle one in the treble clef. These movements all illustrate the stylistic integration espoused by Apollo-Couperin, but to different degrees. The ‘Essai en forme d’Ouverture’ (track 10) adopts the format of a Lullian overture, beginning with the characteristic dotted rhythms in duple metre and continuing with a more contrapuntal section in triple time, based on a pithy initial arpeggio figure. While the predominant style is French, Couperin incorporates Italianate triplet figures in the opening section, and these recur in the short recapitulation at the end of the movement.

The two ensuing airs are solo duets played by the featured composers. Each movement comprises an elegant melody, abundantly ornamented, and an accompanying line incorporating Italianate sequences in flowing quavers. In the ‘Air léger’ (track 11), it is ‘Lulli’ who plays the upper line, while Corelli takes the lower. Their roles are reversed in the ‘Second Air’ (track 12), which is markedly more Italian, with bold melodic leaps and touches of expressive chromatic harmony.

The Apothéose de Lully concludes with a trio sonata entitled ‘La Paix du Parnasse’ (tracka 13-16), its four movements labelled ‘gravement’, ‘vivement’, ‘rondement’ and ‘vivement’. To symbolize this new-found accord in the Muses’ abode, the two melodic lines are marked to be played respectively by ‘Lulli, et les Muses françoises’ and ‘Corelli, et les Muses italiénes [sic]’. Couperin deliberately classifies the piece as a ‘Sonade en trio’ rather than ‘Sonata’, explaining that, because of complaints by the French Muses, ‘we should henceforth say Sonade, Cantade, in speaking their language, just as we say ballade, Sérénade, &c’. For better or worse, Couperin’s campaign to Frenchify these Italian terms fell largely on deaf ears. By contrast, his synthesis of national styles, experienced at its most sophisticated in this trio sonata, was to create a musical language of infinite refinement and emotional power, one that remains his enduring legacy.

In the Catholic liturgy, the Office of Matins on the three days before Easter includes passages from the Lamentations of Jeremiah in which the Hebrew prophet mourns the destruction of Jerusalem. As this Office traditionally began at midnight and entailed the gradual extinguishing of candles, it became known in Latin as ‘Tenebrae’ (‘Darkness’), hence the French term ‘ténèbres’. In Couperin’s France, however, these Holy Week ceremonies began during the previous afternoon; his three Leçons de ténèbres for the ‘Premier Jour’ were thus performed not on Maundy Thursday but on Wednesday of Holy Week.

These Leçons de ténèbres à une et à deux voix were written some time between 1713 and 1717. In his elegantly engraved printed score Couperin tells us that he had earlier composed three of the other Tenebrae lessons ‘at the request of the Nuns of Lxx’ (i.e., the royal abbey of Longchamp, west of Paris). Moreover, he had evidently completed the remaining three but had not yet had time to have these engraved. Alas, he never did so, and the manuscript sources for the unpublished lessons doubtless perished when the abbey was destroyed during the French Revolution.

Couperin’s Leçons de ténèbres belong to a peculiarly French style of Tenebrae setting that originated in the ones composed by Lully’s father-in-law, Michel Lambert. In such works, the prophet’s words are set in a declamatory style interspersed with astonishingly intricate vocalises. These settings demanded virtuoso singers, and fashionable convents such as Longchamp would hire star performers from the Paris Opéra for the occasion. Lecerf de la Viéville was among those who did not approve:

Praise is heaped upon singers who sing a lesson on Good Friday or a solo motet for Easter from behind a curtain, which they pull open from time to time to smile at friends in the audience. People go to hear them at a particular convent. In their honour, the price normally paid at the Opéra is charged for a seat in the church.

Yet if this description suggests that Couperin’s three Leçons de ténèbres are conceived in a merely theatrical spirit, nothing could be further from the truth. They certainly require singers of the highest calibre, but they are also among the most eloquent and impassioned works in his entire œuvre.

For the most part, Jeremiah’s words are set in a declamatory manner that owes less to the recitative of French opera, with its fluctuating metres, than to the sacred Italian monody of the previous century; nevertheless, the severity of the mainly one-syllable-per-note setting is relieved by abundant ornamental detail, whether in the form of delicate agréments or in expressive efflorescences on particularly emotive syllables, all requiring supreme vocal control. Moreover, Couperin deploys a colourful harmonic palette that enhances the grief-laden imagery of the text. He also organizes certain sections into clearly audible forms, either by the use of recapitulated passages, as at ‘Quomodo sedet sola civitas’ in the first lesson, or by a chromatic ground bass, as at ‘Recordata est Jerusalem’ in the second.

It was traditional in settings of the Lamentations to precede each verse of the Latin text with the initial letter in the Hebrew Bible. Like innumerable predecessors, Couperin sets these as lengthy vocalises—a perfect foil to the declamatory writing of the verses. Musically, they are among the highpoints of the set, especially those in the third lesson, where the two voices interlock in achingly poignant suspensions. Is it too fanciful to interpret these as stylized evocations of the grieving Jeremiah’s ululations?